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By Wandering Eyes · Posted
There's a special feel about this place: very different from some of the bigger farms around Lexington, with their miles of fencing leading to wide horizons. Here trees fill the undulations like green mist, and then there's this gem of a house, faithfully reproduced from a much older one in New Hampshire that Dede McGehee came across in a book one day. Hummingbirds flit into the flower baskets on the veranda. Overall, Heaven Trees Farm feels very apt to its name. “Except when I looked into it, it turned out that the Tree of Heaven is an invasive tree, thorny and very noxious!” McGehee says with a chuckle. But she doesn't let that detail trouble her. As far as she's concerned, Heaven Trees was always a family name: a book by Stark Young, who followed up with the neglected Civil War classic So Red the Rose. “Which is a Gone with the Wind kind of book,” she explains. “And it's about a family of McGehees. So, the house my father grew up in, they called Heaven Trees. And later on my aunt had a hunter jumper venue in Jacksonville, Florida, and that was called Heaven Trees, too.” The latest version entered her life 30 years ago, alongside a farm that she leased just behind Keeneland. Having left her job with a Versailles veterinary practice, she put her own band of mares together and boarded others for clients. Plenty of seasonal mares, plus a few permanent ones for people who were friends as much as they were clients. People like the late Dolphus Morrison, a very special man-who left her a very special legacy. Which is why we're troubling McGehee with a visit. Because this is a story people need to hear. “I mean, who does that?” she asks, recounting the gesture Morrison made when his deteriorating health required him to have a dispersal sale. She is palpably moved, recalling it; not really sure, in fact, whether it is too precious, too personal to be shared. It's just that people need to know how big a heart Morrison had. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's rewind a little, to when McGehee's bad luck proved the prelude to something better. Her bad luck was to develop a pulmonary condition. The doctors couldn't figure it out, but somehow she didn't have the oxygen to deliver a foal, never mind spend all her time in barns with musty straw and hay, or people smoking. Eventually they traced the problem to her pet birds: she had a cockatoo and a cockatiel, and it turned out she had an allergy to… cockatoos and cockatiels. “So, I stepped back,” she explains. “Got rid of the birds, went on steroids, and gave up my practice. I said I'd just board mares and do all my own [vet] work. Because I could control my environment. And that's what I did. Leased two farms, kept it all in-house. And I loved it: I had great clients, and a great crew.” Love it as she did, though, she couldn't keep going forever at 20 hours a day. “I did it for a long time, but at some point there has to be more to life,” she reasons. “I had raised horses all this time, and watched other people race them, and have fun watching them run, so I thought maybe I could do that too. So, I shut down the boarding operation. I let the leased farms go, and brought it all home: just my own mares, and Mr. Morrison's.” And, well, Morrison was always going to be the exception. For a start, their own relationship had become something to treasure. Dr. Dede McGehee (DVM) on her farm Heaven Trees | Courtesy Dr. Dede McGehee “He was like a father to me,” McGehee says. “My favorite client of all time. Never micromanaged. Never took bad news badly. And really smart. He grew up in rural Alabama, and built up a steel business from nothing. He was a horseman, too. He and his daughter did those competitive 100-mile rides when she was a teenager. He had Quarter Horses at first, I'm pretty sure that Hal Wiggins was his first [Thoroughbred] trainer. Anyway, he ended up having quite a few mares. And I had an old horse-trading friend who had sold Dolph some mares, and Dolph asked where he should put them. That's how he came here. And he just trusted me. He would say, 'If you have a problem, take care of it and call me later.'” One of these mares was a homebred daughter of Roar, trained by Wiggins to win on debut and then a stakes at the Fair Grounds on her fourth start. “But then a day or two later, she fell coming up through the gap on the concrete,” McGehee recalls. “She split her whole butt down to her hock, it was like 160 stitches. So, she was done, and came to us. And she was tough. She'd been very tough at the racetrack, tough to saddle, tough to blacksmith. She's not mean. She just doesn't like to be messed with, would rather you leave her alone and admire her from afar.” But it was hardly the mare's fault if her first foal, by Medaglia d'Oro, did not endear her to motherhood. “Well, it was a big foal, a difficult foaling,” McGehee points out. “And then she had no milk. It's just something that happens sometimes. It wasn't that the foal was early. She just had absolutely no milk; her bag looked like a mare that had never been bred. Anyway, she had no interest in that filly. When we'd got the nurse mare, she walked straight out of the barn, never nickered, never even looked back. So, we didn't know if that was always going to be her. But no, she was fine. The next year she wasn't the most doting, but she liked him and tolerated being mother. And the next one, she loved. So, she got better and better. I think the maternal was always in there. It was just circumstances that caused her to reject that first foal.” As a result, anyhow, it wasn't even Thoroughbred milk that launched that foal on her journey to becoming Horse of the Year in 2009. For by this stage, you have probably recognized her as Rachel Alexandra, and the mare as Lotta Kim. And that means we can now return to that conversation, in the summer of 2012, when Morrison told McGehee that it was time to break up his program. Actually, it wasn't the first time he had talked that way, but on this occasion it felt different. Both Morrison and his wife had their health problems–something that had contributed to the sale of Rachel Alexandra, after her 20-length win in the GI Kentucky Oaks–and he knew the end of the road was nearing. (He died in 2016.) “But he didn't say, 'How much will my horses bring?'” recalls McGehee. “He didn't say, 'What are they worth?' He said, 'What are you going to do?' I said, 'Well, I'll probably do what I should have done a long time ago. And that's have five good mares, and race everything.' And actually, that has never happened – and probably never will! But that was the goal. And then he said, 'We want Lotta Kim to be one of those five.'” McGehee pauses to gather her emotions. “Who does that?” she repeats. “Really. I mean, people don't even do that for their families. But I loved him, he loved me, and he loved my help. When he sold Rachel, he gave them a bunch of money. He was just a good guy. And so that's what we did. I gave him a dollar.” Lotta Kim and her 2025 Forte filly born Feb. 18 at Dede McGehee's Heaven Trees Farm | Courtesy Dr. Dede McGehee The scale of the legacy became staggeringly clear when a Bolt d'Oro colt out of Lotta Kim made $1.4 million at Saratoga in 2021; and then when a brother to Rachel Alexandra brought $1.35 million from Epic Horses at the 2024 Keeneland September Sale. (Named Epic d'Oro, he is currently breezing at Gulfstream.) “Oh, he was beautiful,” McGehee recalls. “Pretty from day one. But I did not think he would do that. That was a complete surprise. And what was nice, the one at Saratoga my crew couldn't be there, but they could be there for this one.” There will be no more days like that, however: not only because Lotta Kim has now been retired, at 24, but because her last foal, safely delivered this spring, was a Forte filly who will be going nowhere. McGehee was ecstatic when the embryo was sexed. “I knew it would probably be her last one,” she explains. “So, my veterinarian–I don't do my own work anymore–and my farm manager raced to text me first, to tell me it was a filly. And everything went perfect. She's a pro. Except for the first time, of course, with Rachel. She does all the work. We never have to help her very much. But I just think it's time. She gave me a filly, and did it easily. I'm not going to tempt fate. “She doesn't actually look like an old mare. Some of them, you can see it in their face. I've always had older mares here: that was what I started out doing, because I could buy them inexpensively. I could work on them myself, and it was a challenge that I loved. And so, when I'd look at mares at the sale, if they looked old out of their eye, I wouldn't try.” Lotta Kim will be in good company, then, with eight or nine pensioned friends sharing the paddock. “She has mellowed with age,” McGehee says. “But she still likes her routine. If you get off routine, you might have a little trouble catching her! You know, things have got to be her idea.” There are still 20 mares in service, more than McGehee feels sensible. “I do want to cut back,” she says. “I always go back to what I told Mr. Morrison, that I should have five good mares and race everything. But how do you pick? Obviously, I can't keep them all. But at my time of life, I just want to have fun. I want to go watch my horses run. What I'd really like to do is watch one of them win an Oaks!” She actually got within a neck of doing so in 2011, with the homebred St. John's River (Include). And while there was no way McGehee could adequately return the gift she had received from Morrison, she was then at least able to try. “When Rachel ran, they hadn't been able to do all that pre-Oaks stuff: the mornings, the walkover,” she recalls. “So, this time, he came for the week and did all those things he hadn't got to do before. I think he appreciated what he had missed, that time. I haven't really been ready to tell this story. But now Kim is done, now that she's going out in that pasture with the trees and the creek, where she'll be very happy…. I just want people to know how wonderful and gracious he was.” The post The Heavenly Bequest of Rachel’s Breeder appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article -
I saw the clearance rate was an improvement and I'm sure NZB would have reported it in any press release (have not seen any as have been busy). All it does is accentuate that the first day release was spin, because they only included positive markers. Surely you can see that -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
Southwestern trainer Jose Roberto Gonzalez Sr., already serving an 18-month suspension, received an additional 36 months for two banned substances found in the gelding Ol' McClintock. His suspension now runs through July 2, 2030.View the full article -
the failure of hrnz to prioritise and maximise harness racing exposure by utlilisling unhinged content is one of lifes mysteries. for some time i have thought,wouldn't it be great if bit of a yarn had a forum,linked to the harness forum,where the unhinged post race interviews could be clicked on and viewed. you could guarantee it would lead to a very significant increase in people using the chiefs website and would expose harness racing content to all users of this website,including more galloping followers viewing harness racing content.. thats what i would like to see,forget hrnz,they aren't up to the job ,get it on bit of a yarn. i have no idea whether that is practicle or how it could work but i can certainly see the benefits for the chief,unhinged and harness racing if that happened. -
By Chief Stipe · Posted
Significant improvement on clearance rate @hesi - no spin required.
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